


Can You Feel This?

by misseffect



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: 2 4 6 8 why is garrus vakarian great, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Destroy Ending, Established Relationship, F/M, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Mass Effect 3, More like No Vakarian Without Shepard, No Shepard without Vakarian, POV Garrus Vakarian, Post-Canon, Post-Mass Effect 3, Recovery, Shakarian - Freeform, a little short on the comfort i'll be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 20:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18977506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misseffect/pseuds/misseffect
Summary: 'Slap on some fake tattoos and she can dress up as Jack for Halloween.’ Ash said with a smile, dusting the shorn hair carefully off Shepard’s hospital gown.It was thirty-four days since they found Shepard and for the first time in a week, Garrus was sitting in the straight-backed human chair beside her bed.





	Can You Feel This?

**Author's Note:**

> This is my post-destroy ending one-shot. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
> 
> Thanks to Max for beta-ing - it only took me like 5 months to get my shit together. This started life as a Fictober prompt. Yikes.
> 
> For those who like background music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Sx0BojY7k was my brain-food for this one.

‘Slap on some fake tattoos and she can dress up as Jack for Halloween.’ Ash said with a smile, dusting the shorn hair carefully off Shepard’s hospital gown.

It was thirty-four days since they found Shepard and for the first time in a week, Garrus was sitting in the straight-backed human chair beside her bed. Across the room by the window Ash was packing the electric razor, borrowed from Cortez, back into its case. This had been her idea. The previous day, Garrus had mentioned how militant Shepard had always been about keeping her hair tied back and how strange it was to see it clustered around her face in dark, brittle clumps. Hardly and inch of her had escaped the explosion at the Crucible.

Perhaps it didn't come out as off-handedly as he’d hoped – or maybe it was just that he hadn’t spoken to anyone about Shepard in days – either way, Ash hadn't let it go until Garrus agreed they should do something about it.

Between endless supply runs to replenish their dwindling rations and repairing the _Normandy,_ which was in pieces at a half-collapsed warehouse in Tilbury Dock, Garrus could usually find a reason to excuse himself from the hospital. It helped that the rest of the crew had fallen out of their shift pattern by Shepard's bed, too, as the dust began to settle.

Joker had yet to set foot in the room at all and spent most of his time in Tilbury, snapping at everyone working on the _Normandy._ Everyone, that was except Garrus – who he resolutely avoided. Maybe he blamed Shepard for EDI’s death and maybe he didn’t; nobody felt much like asking and Garrus couldn’t say he cared. Joker wasn’t the only one hurting, but Spirits he knew how to act like it.

It made Garrus doubly grateful to Ash for sending the pilot on as many transport flights as she could to keep him occupied, and finding reasons to pick Cortez for anything that included Garrus. The crew had fallen into line behind her in the first few days once it became apparent that Garrus wasn't prepared to step up as Shepard's unofficial second. That didn't change even when he no longer spent all day prowling the corridor outside Shepard's room and unnerving the doctors. He had already failed Shepard. He didn't need more lives in his hands.

‘She’s not getting better, Ash.’

In fact, Shepard looked worse. Her injuries seemed no better now than they were three days after they pulled her out of the rubble, and based on smell alone he was sure something on her left shoulder was infected. When one of the doctors – an unusually tall salarian – had swapped out her IV bag a few minutes ago, the new bag had a different label.

Ashley’s smile wilted into something small and sad. ‘She’ll get there. Give it time.’

‘How much time?’ It came out harder than he meant. ‘How long before we – before – ’

_You can trust my judgement, Garrus._ Chakwas said, the first time they kicked Shepard's heart back to life after she flat-lined in the middle of the night. _This isn't Lazarus. If it’s time to let her go, we’ll let her go._

But so far there had always been one more thing to try; one glimpse of progress. And while Garrus didn’t have the stomach to bring it up, they all knew that even with the Illusive Man’s bottomless wallet Lazarus had gone on for two years. It was never the implants that bothered Shepard either, it was the sense of time gone missing.

'I should've been there,' he said.

'And done what?'

'I don't know.' Not all of Shepard's injuries were caused by the explosion, Chakwas had told him as much. He couldn't shake the thought of her alone, exhausted and bleeding out while Anderson died in front of her. They had found him in the rubble too; gone before the explosion. 'I don't know.'

Ash stood and tucked the bag under her arm. ‘You’ve been indoors all day, you should get some air.’

‘I’m fine.’ The pity in her voice turned it into a growl.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘James is taking a ground team out to Stratford later to hit up the shopping complex again, let him know if you wanna tag along.’

The rain continued into the night as Garrus sat by the bed. It felt wrong to keep the light on – even if Shepard was indifferent – and in the muted blue light of the machines her silhouette began to remind him of the Reaper strung up in the Collector base, all tubes and wires squeezing life into a shell. The image curled up in his gut and no amount of staring at the undamaged rectangle of skin he had managed to find on Shepard’s palm would shift it. They had put her on a tracheal ventilator last time she was in surgery and however much he had hated seeing the tube snaking out of her mouth, the permeance of the thing now taped to her throat frightened him infinitely more.

Garrus inched the chair forward, as close to the bed as his knees would allow, his spurs wedged against the underside of the seat. He hadn't summoned up the courage to touch her, afraid that her thin human skin would slough off in his hands.

Her fingers were a lose half-fist, palm turned up just slightly. He reached so the tip of his talons were just barely touching her thumb, and screwed his eyes shut against the heaving ventilator. He thought of Menae, where holding her hand had been the easiest thing in the galaxy. Slow as the sunrise, he let his fingers slide either side of her thumb and curled them against her palm.

She was cold. Spirits, she was freezing cold.

He exhaled, hard through his mouth, and it came out choked. She was all wrong – bald and gaunt and covered in track marks from tests that couldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know. Shepard wasn’t leaving them. She left them hours before they pulled her out of the rubble.

As he sat there in a chair that wasn't made for turians, holding her hand in the dark, Garrus began to wish they'd never found her at all. If her machines had flatlined again, right in front of him, he wouldn’t have gone yelling for Chakwas. He might even have barricaded the door. Spirits forgive him, but Shepard deserved peace more than he deserved to hear her say his name again.

_Just go, honey._ He willed, silently, as the rain thundered on. _It's over._ _Please. Just go._

Half an hour later, Garrus was packing a bag. He never had been one for sitting still. She would understand.

It was Joker, of all people, who caught him crouched in a puddle, breaking into a hospital transport.

‘Don’t tell me you’re leaving.’ The pilot was back-lit by the hospital and the shadow that fell on the side of the shuttle was as square-shouldered he had ever seen it.

Garrus, elbow deep in the door panel and groping along a stretch of cable, didn’t trust himself to answer. The shuttle wasn’t dissimilar to the battered second-fleet transports they had kept at C-Sec for emergencies. Sometimes with the older models if you could just find the right breaker -

‘Garrus. Tell me you’re not leaving.’

‘Go inside, Joker,’ Garrus snapped.

Back on the SR1 he had been naïve enough to assume the emotional range of human interactions must be stunted by their single larynx, but even the most sheltered turian couldn’t mistake the sour tone when Joker spoke again.

‘Y’know what, Garrus? I always knew you were a flight risk. First C-Sec, then Spectre training, then Omega – now Shepard – ’

Garrus twisted his torso, putting his back to Joker, and swapped arms to get a better angle as the cable took a turn upwards. Damn civilian shuttles.

‘ – running away like a fucking teenager to throw yourself a pity party in some backwater shithouse as soon as things go wrong – that’s all you’ve ever done – it’s all you know _how_ to do.’

Joker was either deaf to the hostile subvocal chattering pouring from Garrus or he didn’t care. This had been coming for weeks. It was grief. That was what it was. That was all.

‘How’s it feel, Garrus? Huh?’ Joker’s voice pitched to a shout, tearing at the seams. ‘How’s it feel to know you’ve never followed through on a thing in your _god-damned_ _life_?’

Garrus spat a curse that he knew wouldn’t translate and shook rain out of his eyes, levering both fingers under what he hoped was the right casing, enough to make the bolts creak.

‘You wouldn’t know commitment if it shit in your boots – ’ Joker roared. ‘Billions of people are dead, Garrus – half the galaxy would _kill_ for what you have but oh _no_ – that’s not enough, is it – you’re Garrus-fucking-Vakarian – chronic drop-out – half-assed deadbeat – ’

Two hands grabbed Garrus by the back of the cowl and he pitched backwards, pain spiking up one arm as his talons caught the edge of the circuit box. The shuttle door popped open with a snap of electricity and they both landed hard on the concrete. Garrus snatched up his bag, fumbling the strap, and knocked the door wide to throw it into the hold, following it in before Joker could try anything else.

‘Garrus – ’ Joker's voice was almost lost in the static of the rain on the shuttle roof and that, somehow, was worse than the shouting.

He couldn’t stop. If he looked behind at the great slab of a building and its flat red brick, silent and bleeding white light, he would never want to move again. When Garrus reached for the lever to close the door behind him Joker was sitting up, holding his elbow.

‘Don’t – Garrus – ’ The words were small and had a thick-nosed sound. ‘She’ll come back.’

Like Shepard might stroll around a corner at any moment with a fistful of ration bars and a coffee cup balanced on a datapad. Like she could breathe on her own. Like she could walk. Water was dripping steadily from the front of Joker’s cap and his shoulders heaved like he’d been running. Garrus had seen him yell at Shepard exactly once, after Thessia, and it had rattled her for days. They were all hurting then, too.

Garrus’ hand was still on the lever. If there was ever a moment to change his mind, that was it.

‘Call me when she goes.’

And he slammed the door.

 

Garrus flew until the sun came up, cold red through an atmosphere still coughing out smoke, then set a course for the farthest city the fuel gauge could manage. His talons still ached. This wasn't about running, he told himself, it was about _doing_ something. It was a Commander Shepard battle plan; don't look back, keep pushing, and never _ever_ hesitate.

He spent the next three months in what remained of Mumbai, with what remained of the local law enforcement as they tried to put a hundred-thousand lives back together. The Reapers had cut through it like they had cut through Cipritine and London; quickly and with indifferent, methodical cruelty. The southern peninsula – once a business hub to rival Ilium – had been reduced to an ocean of shattered glass, blinding in the midday sun, scattered through with half-collapsed buildings like tree stumps.

Any vague hope Garrus might have had about disappearing melted away early; he seemed to be one of about four other turians in a thirty-clik radius. He settled instead for making himself useful enough that nobody objected to having him around, intimidating enough that nobody bothered him, and mediocre enough to avoid being put in charge of anything too important.

He was assigned to a squad headed up by an asari commando who called herself Vee. She had a penchant for close combat and reminded him more of Tali than anyone else – though maybe that was just the shotgun.

The days in Mumbai were long; one tragedy always spilling into another. When Garrus arrived there were already sleeper pods set up all the way to the horizon, and still – despite the fatal outbreaks of disease and the dwindling food stockpiles – the refugees kept coming, some on foot from inland but many more across the water on boats that looked a century old.

Casualty patrols in the silent rubble were hardest. Garrus had learned to savour small victories on Omega, but that didn’t make it any easier to stack repairing a doctor's omni-tool against yet another classroom scattered with tiny, dust-caked bodies. The only real mercy was exhaustion. He had never been one for nightmares but at least if he went to bed with a different kind of pain in every bone, he wouldn't be able to lie awake thinking about Shepard's hands for too long.

His days on desk duty were rare – he showed Vee just enough competence to avoid that – but every night that followed he would fidget in his human-proportioned bunk for hours. When the last of his squad returned for the night, he would get up and dress for patrol so nobody asked any questions, and walk to the red sandstone ruin of a castle on the edge of the district, scavenging alcohol along the way. Then he would climb to the highest part of the rubble, where the sleeper pod lights blinked like stars on a lake and drink until he couldn't hear Joker screaming at him through the rain.

It was one of those nights the first time his father called.

The Hierarchy were beginning to regroup on Palaven as quantum entanglement communication became more reliable, he told Garrus, but he and Solana were on Digeras in the neighbouring Castellus System. The Reapers had dealt the planet a few glancing blows on their way to Palaven and were destroyed before they had the chance to double-back.

Now devoid of the urgency that motivated their last call when Garrus was still aboard the _Normandy_ , the conversation was cautious and excessively polite. If Garrus hadn’t been putting so much effort into sounding sober it might have grated on him more. And then after five or so minutes of talking around it –

‘I heard about the Commander.’

Garrus made a non-committal noise. Even with limited extranet and no relays, news found a way to get around. Though, for now at least, the reporters seemed to be pulling pictures of semi-abandoned London hospitals out of their asses. Ash was smart enough to keep the _Normandy_ under a roof and steer patrols clear of civilian hotspots.

‘You know – ’ his father’s tone went clipped as he forced himself to keep talking into Garrus's prickly silence, ‘ – when your mother was sick – ’

‘Don’t throw Mom at me.’

The distant rumbling on the other end of the line wouldn’t have made it through any translator but the equivalent in humans was a sigh; the nasally kind that Miranda was particularly fond of, deliberately heavy and long-suffering.

‘You’ll never get this time back,’ Castis said, flatly, ‘that’s all I was going to say.’

Garrus muted his line and up-ended the bottle of cheap dextro-something until his throat seared. He hadn’t been around much for those last few months in the palliative care ward. There were politicians to hassle and resources to secure and battalions of ancient machines on the horizon; whole worlds full of rooms where time wasn’t measured by the slow drip of fluid bags. Solana had barely spoken to him since, even when he was stationed on Menae. She would be able to come up with something much more creative than _half-assed deadbeat_ , Garrus had no doubt about that. The whiskey was settling in his stomach like acid. Or was it rum? Chakwas would know.

'...Garrus? Are you still there?'

If he wasn't already half a bottle deep, Garrus would have just hung up. Instead he unmuted the line.

'You would've hated her,' he informed his father.

‘The woman we have to thank for the survival of the galaxy?’ Castis said, with a passable stab at levity. ‘Give me some credit, Garrus.’

Garrus didn't laugh. ‘She could save the universe and it wouldn’t be enough for you to forgive the state of her desk. And she had a hamster – on a war frigate.’

‘She had a what?’

‘Tiny Earth rodent. Palm of your hand.’

The first time they docked on the Citadel after Omega, Shepard got to the bottom of two credit chits cleaning out every store in Zakera Ward.

_If that cybernetic fuck thinks I’m done costing him credits, he’s got another thing coming,_ Shepard had said, as she and Garrus sat on the floor of her cabin cataloguing everything for the mother of all expense reports. The criminally over-priced fish came in individual cannisters about the size and shape of frag grenades. Garrus stood at intervals to release a few of them into the tank because he could reach the lid without standing on a chair. Eventually they were down to the last one – a square glass box much bigger than the rest and – uh...

_I think you’ve been had, Shepard, there isn’t even any water in this one._

He had lifted the box to eye level and tipped it experimentally. The tiny animal came skittering out of the den in the corner, sliding down the slope face first. Garrus righted the box again so fast that its feet almost left the glass. His panicked expression sent Shepard into a laughing fit that made her face flush red and later that night in his cot at the back of the battery, Garrus wondered if he was the first person to make her laugh like that in two years.

He wasn’t sure what to make of that thought at the time. Now, it made him feel sick.

‘That doesn’t seem very...’ Castis was grasping for a neutral word. ‘...safe.’

‘No,’ Garrus said, scratching under one mandible. ‘It escaped once and ate its way through a fuse box. Shorted the hard-lock on all the doors.’

He had been shut in the cargo bay with Vega and Cortez for an hour while Daniels crawled around the vents replacing wires, and Shepard and Donnelly lured the offending animal out with crumbled levo rations. After the excitement died down Joker requested a whole battalion of hamsters, which EDI made a strongly-worded case against.

‘No idea how it didn’t electrocute itself,’ Garrus mused. ‘Damn thing was invincible.’

His father gave a good-humoured thrum and changed the subject. Castis was more agreeable and less bull-headed than Garrus had ever thought possible, though probably – he reflected glumly – they both were. Coming to terms with the destruction of everything they knew seemed to have that effect. Not that either of them were about to admit it.

While his father’s company became gradually less unwelcome, it was a cautious kind of company and Garrus found himself pulled back towards the _Normandy_ crew as the weeks stretched towards the midpoint of Earth’s solar year. It started out as messages back and forth with Liara, who asked after the situation in Mumbai. Garrus didn’t bother asking how she knew where he was. She was slowly re-establishing her contact web. These first few years would be crucial, she said. The asaris’ catastrophic loss on Thessia and the near-total annihilation of the batarians had tipped the galactic scales; power vacuums were inevitable and for the sake of their children’s futures, they needed to be filled with the right people. She'd had no luck getting hold of Wrex or Miranda, but had managed to speak to Hackett, who showed a cursory interest in Shepard’s well-being and then asked if they could spare any resources. Liara had politely declined and didn’t answer the next time he called.

She didn't bring up the Hierarchy or the line of succession. Perhaps she knew Garrus would've stopped talking to her if she had.

 

After Liara came questions from Tali, who was salvaging what she could from the _Normandy's_ Thanix Cannon. Garrus asked about Rannoch in an effort to share Tali's enthusiasm, but he must not have sounded entirely sincere because her answers grew gradually shorter. Then there was a lengthy set of emails from Ash, who was using her downtime to learn some obscure North-Palaven language out of a book she’d found instead of using a translator. While Garrus could guess maybe a third of the words, the grammar didn’t make much more sense to him that it did to her. Neither of them mentioned Shepard and he didn’t ask.

He heard little from Vega – much of what he did hear was secondhand from Ash – and less from Cortez, whose only message was to let Garrus know that if he ever wanted to come back, he'd only need to say the word. Garrus deleted it without replying and then spent three consecutive nights on top of the red sandstone ruin. Spirits, he missed them. He had expected it to fade with time, but every day he spent with Vee and her team seemed to provide something new to tear him open all over again.

There was radio silence from Joker, except when Garrus was alone in the dark and the small, cruel voice in the back of his skull began to sound human.

His Mumbai squad were a mixed bag; majority human with a few asari and one other turian. Like every fighting force in the galaxy they had sustained heavy losses and were suffering under an influx of new recruits. What many of them lacked in skill, though, they at least made up for in drive – especially the humans. While Garrus kept his head down for the most part, he suspected that Vee recognised him from the Alliance vids of the _Normandy_ or she was familiar enough with turians to have heard _Vakarian_ somewhere before. Either way, she seemed to come down on him a little harder than the rest of the team, which was why he groaned inwardly when his omni-tool rang in the middle of a morning briefing.

Vee, who had been walking the room handing out battered datapads, froze in place. ‘Who – ’

‘Mine, sorry.’ Garrus flicked it to silent without checking the ID.

His father was the only person who called unannounced like that. Unusual for him to try this time of day though – it had to be the middle of the night on Digeras. Half a second later the call light was flashing again silently. Garrus covered it with his palm and diverted his attention back to the holo-screen with the day's patrol routes, waiting until Vee turned her back so he could –

Joker?

‘Is there a problem, Vakarian?’ Vee had her arms folded, head cocked.

‘No, ma’am.’ He felt heavy, like the first step onto a planet with alien gravity.

‘Seems somebody wants to talk to you.’

‘Uh – ’ The light was still blinking. This time Garrus declined the call, missing the button twice. ‘It can wait.’

He’d spent every waking second of the two-hundred and five days since leaving London with this moment stuffed into a back corner of his mind. Joker wouldn’t call now, like this, for anything else. Despite everything – despite Shepard's frozen hands and her slack jaw and that final sickening night in her room – the new reality hurtling towards him down the comm line strapped to his wrist was more than he could stand.

The only other turian in the room, a bare-face called Inanis, leaned out of the line up to stare at Garrus.

Another light appeared beside the first. Red; new message.

_ANSWER MY GODDAMN CALLS YOU TURIAN BASTARD_

Vee wasn’t especially well-versed in turian body language or subvocal cues but the look from Inanis was enough. She pointed Garrus to the door with her thumb. ‘Take five.’

It took two more missed calls before Garrus could finally bring himself to answer.

‘Joker,’ he said, like it was the first word he'd spoken in days.

And then he was running.

The pilot was already most of the way across Europe when he started calling, and by the time Garrus made it to the shuttle station that the traffic controllers were using to funnel international arrivals, he only had to wait an hour – an hour of pacing and fidgeting and getting in everybody's way – for the Kodiak’s blue paint to cruise into the hanger. Before the landing gear had even set down properly, the pilot-side door hissed open and Joker swung his legs out. Then he stuck out his hand. His expression was stiff, his chin square and forward – and his hat was missing.

For the first time in an age, Garrus wanted to laugh. ‘Damn, I bet Vega you were hiding asari tentacles under there.’

‘I’m making a peace offering, Vakarian, don’t be an asshole.’ But the corner of his mouth twitched.

Garrus shook his hand. It was a human gesture that he hadn't properly understood until Menae. 'It's good to see you, Joker.'

'I'm sorry. ' Joker said, carefully, like he'd rehearsed it the whole way there. 'About what I said. I was – ' Maybe it was just the hat but he looked older, suddenly. 'It wasn't fair.'

Garrus flicked his mandibles, the turian equivalent of a shrug. 'Some of it wasn't wrong, either.'

'Yeah, well...' Joker heaved his legs back inside the cockpit. 'You beat yourself up enough as it is, you don't need me helping you out.' He hit a button on the console and the door in the belly of the shuttle swung upwards. 'C'mon – if I fly this thing like I stole it we might even beat the sunset.'

 

That flight was the longest of Garrus's life. It was Chakwas who met him in the hospital lobby and talked him up to Shepard's room, jogging every few steps to keep up.

_I don’t know what Joker told you, I asked him not to say too much – She’s still in and out – Her cognitive functions are quite impaired which is to be expected at this stage – There's no indication that she recognises any of us yet – It’ll take months, maybe years – I wanted to hold off calling you until we knew more but Jeff insisted – You have to understand that she might never get back to where she was – We’ll get around to prosthetics but it’s still a long way off – Garrus – please be careful –_

It was more like a bedroom than he remembered. There was a jacket slung over the awful flat-backed chair by the bed and a workstation piled one corner of the room with monitors sticking out at every angle. The small stack of books had to be Ash; the jacket, Vega. Open ration bar packets – dextro from the wrapping – and empty coffee cups. A gangling plant growing in a beer glass; the model of the Destiny Ascension from Shepard’s cabin, held together with tape and lopsided on the window ledge; a few extra chairs padded with cushions, soft grey and dimpled – and Joker’s ratty SR2 hat pulled over Shepard’s head.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Chakwas said, gently. ‘Call if you need anything.’

Garrus could only nod. Despite the lived-in feeling, the late afternoon sun gave the room a forced sense of calm, like an empty stretch of land on the nowhere-planets they used to hit in the Mako. It was suddenly very difficult to breathe.

Both Joker and Chakwas had prepared him for her legs; the sheets on the bed tapered flat suddenly below the knees. The skin on her arms was ridged in odd places like seams in welded metal where grafts knitted together. She was mostly free from bandages again and – thank Spirits – the ventilator was gone, though when he looked there was still a square of gauze taped over her throat where–

He stomped down the echo of the Reaper and focused instead on the hair just beginning to regrow, thin and wispy, on the nape of her neck below the cap, and the way her chest was rising and falling by itself. Even after all those nights in her cabin waiting for her sleep-cycle to catch up to his, he had never quite gotten used to _seeing_ her breathe, fascinated and terrified in equal measure by how little there was keeping her insides, inside.

Shepard was sleeping now rather than comatose, her head rolled away from him, and looked like she planned to stay that way for a while. Still, it was twenty minutes before he noticed the call light blinking on his wrist.

‘Dad – sorry. It’s... been a weird day.’

‘Wait, don’t tell me – ’ Castis made an exaggeratedly pensive noise, ‘ – let’s see, you didn’t get pushed out of a window again?’

‘No – ’

‘Hmh – a child dropped their toy down a drain.’

‘Actually – ’

‘Shuttle chase? Lunchtime bar-fight?’

‘I’m in London.’

The line went quiet. ‘Oh.’

‘Yeah,’ Garrus swallowed, then added. ‘She started waking up a few days ago. They told me this morning.’

‘That’s... good, isn’t it?’ Castis said, carefully. Garrus’s unease must have been audible; he’d gotten sloppy at hiding his subvocals lately. Too much time around humans.

Garrus hunched and ran both hands slowly over his fringe. ‘She’s been asleep since I got here but – I don’t know – she’s still pretty sick.’

‘How sick?’

It wasn’t a question Castis would have asked – even six weeks earlier – with the sincerity that he did now. So Garrus told him about her legs, and all the surgery they still needed to do, and how nothing could have prepared him for how quickly humans lose muscle when they’re out of commission. At her peak, Shepard could've benched a juvenile krogan. Now he doubted she’d be able to lift her own bodyweight.

‘ – and she doesn’t recognise anyone.’

Garrus hadn’t allowed himself to consider what a reunion might look like – not even at the bottom of all the drink in Mumbai – or given much thought to what Shepard's injuries might actually entail in the long run. It had felt cruel to hope she'd make it this far at all.

‘Well, I won’t pretend to be an expert in human biology but a seven-month coma is enough to scramble anybody.’

‘She’s been medically dead twice, Dad. Three times if you count – ’ Garrus broke off, kneading his browplates between finger and thumb. Alchera still made his fringe prickle. ‘The physical capability she used to have is gone – she might never get it back – and even if the actual brain damage is minimal, she just – she might not be the same person.’

_She might not be the person who loved me_. It wasn’t something he had thought to be afraid of until now.

Castis was quiet for a moment. Garrus couldn’t bring himself to look at Shepard.

‘I have enough regrets for one lifetime, Garrus,’ he said, eventually, in the slow unruffled tone that had once infuriated Garrus so badly. ‘But I wouldn’t change a minute of the time I spent with your mother, not even when she didn’t know me from a hanar. I can’t tell you it’s all going to be fine but if it helps – ’ He faltered, just slightly, and covered by clearing his throat. ‘If it helps I don’t think you’ll regret returning to London.’

Castis was trying to be kind and Garrus was trying to be grateful for it. He was going to say _thanks, Dad_ but when he sat back in the chair the words died in his mouth.

Shepard was awake. Shepard was awake and she was watching him under the peak of Joker’s cap.

‘Dad, she’s – ’ Spirits, her _eyes,_ green as anything on the Presidium. ‘I need to go. I’ll call you back.’

‘Of course.’ His tone was almost warm. ‘Take care, Garrus.’

‘You too.’

Garrus fumbled blindly for the disconnect as if her face – pale and gaunt as it was – might dissolve if he looked away. Her right eye was bloodshot from the outer corner, and the skin was dark pink and creased from her temple down her cheek, just beginning to scar.

‘Shepard?’

If she heard him, it didn’t show. Her expression was soft, faintly puzzled, and so un-Shepard-like that Garrus felt dizzy. She studied his face, slowly and vacantly, and he half-expected her to reach out and tug on his mandibles like a child. Carefully, he scooped up her hand and pressed her knuckles first to his mouth, then to his forehead so he didn’t have to watch the engine behind her eyes turning over and over. Her fingers curled slowly around his thumb and he tried to find it in himself to be glad that she was warm again.

When they said goodbye before the Crucible, Garrus had told her that he loved her, finally, in as many words, in case the thousand other little acts of love didn’t make their meaning clear enough in the chaos of the preceding months. If this really was it; if Shepard didn’t know him now and never would – or, worse, didn’t want him – then he would try to find a way to make peace with that, in time. Maybe it was better this way, he told himself. This way, she would never really know what she'd lost.

He would've stayed there holding her hand for hours if a strange, sharp gasping noise hadn’t started him upright. Shepard’s face had crumpled into an alarming new shape, all shivering and watery-eyed. The grip on his thumb closed tight and her arm shook with the effort of it, tears catching in the dark scoops under her eyes. Garrus held the back of her hand to the side of his face – the part that was discoloured and raw, where she had touched him a lifetime ago before the relay and again for the last time before the beam.

‘It’s okay, Shepard,’ he said, as gently as he could through the subvocal whine roiling in his chest. ‘You’re alright. You’re okay.’

Her mouth was slightly open – the skin on her lips off-pink, cracked through with white – and he could see her throat bobbing under the gauze, soundless except for rattling, hiccuping breathing until–

‘ _G – ru – s_.’

Turian languages were nothing if not practical – the local Vakarian dialect had thirteen words for law and two for love _–_ but Garrus couldn’t have turned that moment into words if he spoke every language in the galaxy.

The whine pitched to a keening sound that pulled her name out behind it. ‘Shepard – Spirits, _Shepard.’_

She grasped at his arm with her free hand as he lifted Joker’s cap and nudged his forehead into her temple. The antiseptic, medigel smell was still there, under the sharp saltwater tang, and so too was the metallic trace left by healing wounds – but behind that there was _Shepard_ again.

‘ _Ga – r – u – ’_

Her hand found his face, fumbling over the familiar angles, and he could feel her shaking against his forehead.

‘Got lost on the way to the bar, huh?’

And underneath the tears, through her torn vocal chords, Shepard choked out a laugh.

 


End file.
